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Topic: RE: Creating accessible text tables (Via Email)
Conf: (P-PDF) PDF Accessibility, Msg: 133058
From: Duff_Johnson
Date: 5/20/2005 12:46 AM

> I am working on a series of documents (there are dozens of
> them) that all must be made 508 compliant.
>
> Each contains a text table that is two columns wide and
> anywhere from 5 to over 100 rows deep.
>
> I have tried laying out the documents and tables in both
> QuarkXPress 5 and InDesign 3, and I cannot get the tables to
> "read" properly after I make the PDFs accessible. I am using
> Acrobat 6 Pro on PC (XP).

First, forget Quark entirely. Creating PDFs from Quark remains
essentially at prehistoric levels in general, and tagging a
Quark-generated PDF is almost always an exercise in frustration for one
reason or another.

As for InDesign... how are you making the PDFs? Are you simply printing
to a PDF driver, or are you using the "Export to PDF" utility in
InDesign, and allowing it to create Tags in your document?

See the "Authoring for accessibility and reflow in Adobe InDesign and
Acrobat" instruction files on this page:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_info.html

They are a bit dated, but will be useful to you nonetheless, I suspect.

> No matter how I format the tables -- manually or using
> Quark's or InDesign's table features -- the text is not being
> read in the correct order. (Which would be reading all the
> text in the first column cell, then the second column cell,
> then moving down to the next row.)

That description makes me wonder if you really have a table here, or
instead have headers and footers in a two-column layout.

If it's a real table, then the columns and/or rows must include header
cells... information that delivers the context for the information in
each data cell. If you define these header cells and the rest of the
table correctly in terms of rows and cells, then the "reading order" of
the table will take care of itself, because it will be accessed using
table-aware software.

Also... what are you using as a screen-reader to test these files?
Don't use Adobe's Read Out Loud function... it won't read a table as a
proper screen-reader would.

> Any suggestions? Some of these tables are two or three pages
> long, so I don't know if using alt text is even a viable
> option. Is there a limit to how much alt text can be used in
> one description?

Oh, you don't want to go with alt. text here....

> If upgrading to Quark 6.5 or InDesign 4 and Acrobat 7 Pro
> will help deal with the problem, I'd do that in a heartbeat.

Well, Acrobat 7.01 Professional will make it FAR easier for you to tag
the right reading order, or table structure, whichever is actually
required.

Duff Johnson
Document Solutions, Inc.
http://www.document-solutions.com